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28 Consuming Media

Against this background, it is no accident that a book about passages through a
contemporary shopping centre includes photographs, providing an overview of this
visual environment. The sources of inspiration for the research group included the
well-known tradition within sociology and anthropology of incorporating photog-
raphy into ethnographic methods. In environments where cultural meaning is
expressed in visual symbolic forms, the camera is a self-evident tool for documenta-
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tion and interpretation. Within the framework of the Passages project, we received
permission from the shopping centre to take photographs as a part of our field-
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work. In addition to our own photographs, we gathered other material where Solna
Centre is visually represented. The visual space of the shopping centre extends
beyond its geographic location, and we therefore included images, for example, from
advertising campaigns and the centre’s home page.
The pictures that follow are selected to represent that which we identify as typical
for Solna Centre during the period we were carrying out our research. They are
specific and concrete, all from a specific location and made between 1999 and 2002.
Nevertheless, they must also be seen as abstractions. The still photograph can only
ever isolate an instant; it can never represent the truth of how something always is.
The ‘here and now’ that the photograph is witness to is already a thing of the past.
This sense of looking into the disappearing past is certainly a primary reason that
photographs continue to hold such fascination.
The image the photograph provides of the past is further related to what Benjamin
referred to as the ‘optical unconscious’: ‘Evidently a different nature opens itself to
the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously pene-
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trated space is substituted for a space consciously explored.’ Through a photograph
one can see or recognize things that are part of a past experience, including aspects
of that experience one was not aware of at the time. Therein lies a paradox of photog-
raphy. On the one hand, the photograph can reveal that which is no longer visible or
has previously been unknown. However it can also transform that which was
assumed to be well known and familiar into something strange and new.
The photograph’s ability to ‘make strange’ what is familiar and known has clear
advantages when exploring an everyday environment such as a shopping centre. The
easily recognized mixture of objects and people that coexist in that space re-emerge in
a new light. One notices details that one had not previously seen and discovers rela-
tionships between different phenomena of which one had been unaware. For the
researcher, the photograph’s ability to ‘make strange’ one’s own perspective on a
familiar environment can lead to a more nuanced and reflexive analysis of the field.
The photographs we have selected hopefully support a more thorough understanding
of the encounters between people and media that occur there. For the reader who is
already familiar with Solna Centre, the photographs can offer a new perspective. For
the majority of readers who have never visited Solna, or for that matter may never have
been in Sweden, there is still much that will look strange yet also strangely familiar,
recognizable from other shopping centres in other parts of the world. These photo-
graphs, for all their specificity of time and place, portray phenomena that are global.